FRS-284

Symptoms

FRAM will not start and throws the message below.

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Background

On *nix, it's common to have users whose shells are restrictive, i.e. inhibit login. A common way of doing this is to have /usr/sbin/nologin as their shell.
Our FRAM service requires a shell in order to start correctly.

Default behaviour (v4.0.4 and earlier)

Our startup script /etc/init.d/framd does the following:

su -c "/opt/fusionreactor/tomcat/bin/framd-real start" nobody

Uses the "su" command to run a command as another user (init.d scripts are run by init as root), in this case nobody

The framd-real script is the real script that starts FRAM

In the fault case, framd does not start because of the restricted shell for nobody.

Important Notes

In this technote, we have assumed your JEE engine (eg JRun/ColdFusion) is running as the user "nobody". If this is not the case then you should replace the "nobody" references as appropriate. Please refer to http://www.fusion-reactor.com/support/kb/FRS-270.cfm for further details

In some cases where a user has run the installer twice on the same server, it's possible the /etc/init.d/framd script has been corrupted. If you do not see the command